Zera Yacob and the Hatata: Ethiopia's Philosopher of Reason

Imagine being forced to choose sides in a religious war. The king has changed his faith, foreign priests are in charge at court, and your enemies have told the authorities that you are a traitor. You run. You take a little gold and a book of Psalms, and you hide in a cave beside a river, alone, for two years.

What do you think about in that cave?

According to a remarkable manuscript, an Ethiopian scholar named Zera Yacob used those two years to ask one of the biggest questions in philosophy: How can I know what is true, when everyone around me claims to have the truth? The answer he wrote down, decades later, is called the Hatata, a Ge'ez word meaning "inquiry" or "investigation".

A scholar in troubled times

The Hatata tells us that Zera Yacob was born in 1599 near Aksum, in northern Ethiopia, the son of a poor farming family. He studied in the traditional church schools of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, learning the Psalms, qene poetry (famous for its hidden double meanings), and the interpretation of scripture.

He grew up in a dangerous period. In the 1620s, Emperor Susenyos converted to Roman Catholicism under the influence of Portuguese Jesuit missionaries and tried to bring the whole country with him. The result was rebellion and bloodshed. Zera Yacob says he was denounced to the king and fled, finding shelter in a cave near the Tekezé River.

Later he settled in the town of Enfraz, near Lake Tana, where he worked for a wealthy man, married a woman named Hirut, and taught his employer's sons. One of those students, Walda Heywat, encouraged him to write his ideas down. Zera Yacob says he finished the Hatata in 1667. He died in 1692.

The light of reason

The heart of the Hatata is simple and bold. Zera Yacob noticed that every religion around him said the same thing: our faith is true and the others are false. Christians, Muslims and Jews, Orthodox and Catholics, all made this claim, and all were ready to fight for it. They could not all be right. So how could anyone decide?

His answer was that God has given every human being the light of reason. We should use it to test what we are told, rather than simply accepting the words of priests, teachers or books. A belief that agrees with reason and with the goodness of creation can be trusted. One that contradicts them should be doubted, however holy its source claims to be.

From this starting point he reached some striking conclusions:

• God exists, he argued, because the world and its order point to a creator, and because people everywhere have a sense that something made them.
• Creation is good. If God made the world, then the things God made, such as food, marriage and the body, cannot be evil in themselves. He criticised strict fasting rules and the idea that celibate monks were holier than married people.
• Men and women are equal in marriage. He argued that a man should have only one wife, and that husband and wife share the same dignity.
• No religion has the right to kill in God's name. He was deeply critical of holy wars and forced conversion, having seen their results with his own eyes.

Readers often compare the Hatata to the work of the French philosopher René Descartes, whose famous Discourse on Method appeared in 1637. Both start from doubt and rebuild knowledge using reason. But Zera Yacob's questions came from his own Ethiopian world, its scriptures and its conflicts, and there is no evidence he ever read Descartes.

The student who kept going

Walda Heywat wrote his own Hatata, which builds on his teacher's ideas and turns them towards everyday ethics: how to live well, treat others fairly, work honestly and raise children. Together the two texts form a small but rich body of Ethiopian moral philosophy.

Who really wrote it?

Here the story becomes a mystery. The Hatata became known to the outside world through an Italian Capuchin monk, Giusto d'Urbino, who collected Ethiopian manuscripts in the 1850s for the French scholar Antoine d'Abbadie. The copies ended up in Paris.

In 1920, the Italian scholar Carlo Conti Rossini declared that the Hatata was a forgery written by d'Urbino himself. Part of his argument was that such independent philosophy could not have come from seventeenth-century Ethiopia. That assumption says more about colonial attitudes than about Ethiopia, and Conti Rossini later supported Italian colonial rule in Ethiopia.

Other scholars pushed back. In the 1970s, the Canadian philosopher Claude Sumner, who taught for decades in Addis Ababa, studied the language and style of the text closely and argued that d'Urbino could not have written it. Ethiopian scholars such as Getatchew Haile also defended its authenticity. More recently, the French historian Anaïs Wion has made a careful case that d'Urbino was the author after all.

The debate is not settled. What has changed is the tone: today it is a serious argument about evidence, not about whether Africans were capable of philosophy. New translations and an international conference at Oxford have brought the text to many more readers.

Why it matters

Whoever held the pen, the Hatata is written in Ge'ez, grounded in Ethiopian scripture and shaped by Ethiopian history. And its central idea still speaks to us: that every person has the ability, and the right, to think for themselves, and that no authority should be allowed to silence that voice.

For a country that has kept its own script, calendar and religious traditions for centuries, Zera Yacob's cave is a fitting symbol: a quiet place where one man refused to stop asking questions.

Further reading

• University of Oxford, Centre for Intellectual History — In Search of Zera Yacob: Philosophy in Early Modern Ethiopia
• The Reporter (Ethiopia) — The Hatata Inquiries
• Claude Sumner, Ethiopian Philosophy, Vol. II (Addis Ababa, 1976)